Them: Why don't you act your age?
Me: Well, I've never been this age before.

Like buying booze, renting a car, purchasing a handgun, buying a lottery ticket, getting a tatoo?

(some of these vary by state)

I don't see how you're too immature to order a Chianti with your steak dinner but you're mature enough to go $200K in debt based on a sales pitch of returns after investment.

These aren't even reasonable equivalents from a neuroscience perspective.

A read is supposed to be fine. At read time the firmware *should* rewrite the cell if the read is weak.

The firmware also *should* go out and patrol the cells when idle and it has power.

you can dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/null bs=2M once a year if your firmware behaves.

If your drive is offline you could
dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdX bs=2M iflag=fullblock conv=sync,noerror status=progress

to be sure, though write endurance is finite.

If you're running zfs you can 'zpool scrub poolname' to force validation of all the written data. This is most helpful when you can't trust the firmware to not be buggy crap. Which only applies to 90% of drive firmware out there.

Well 0-clicks and OTA attacks but yeah, to your point, device compromise lets you use apps on the device.

News at 11!

> I have found that streaming directly to my Plex home server over TLS is generally smoother without going through Wireguard. Not quite sure why.

I recently had to solve this.

Wireguard should work with a regular 1500byte MTU connection at 1440 or 1420 bytes (the default) --- however --- if your ISP is routing your IPv4 using 4-in-6 internally (like my major cable company) everything goes to hell.

Try dropping your wg MTU to 1360, MSS at 1320, and set up a mangle table to clamp MSS to PMTU (e.g. iptables rule).

I got a 10x bump in TLS over wireguard throughput.

Total pain in the ass and lightly documented.

Well I shared the thread including your thought with Grok, and it said this:
-----
Here’s my actual, unbiased take on the technical debate (no Elon worship, no green hype, just physics and engineering reality as of 2025).
The original Slashdot skeptic is repeating a criticism that was 100% correct for the classic 1970s–2000s “hot dry rock” (HDR) projects (Los Alamos, Rosemanowes, Soultz 2000s era, etc.). Those really were conduction-limited. You drilled two wells a few hundred meters apart into 200–250 C granite, fracked a small volume, and watched the reservoir cool in months because heat was only replenishing by slow conduction through intact rock ( 2–3 W/mK). The recoverable fraction was tiny, and the impedance kept rising. That’s why HDR basically died commercially for 20 years.
Superhot / supercritical geothermal (400–450 C target, aiming for >500 C) is genuinely trying to escape that trap, and the physics does allow it—if everything works. Here’s why the critique no longer fully applies:

Energy density jumps by ~10× once you cross the critical point (374 C, 221 bar).
A kilogram of supercritical water at 500 C and 300 bar carries roughly 2,800–3,000 kJ/kg of usable enthalpy, versus ~300 kJ/kg for 250 C liquid water steam conversion in conventional geothermal. That alone reduces the mass flow (and therefore the parasitic pumping power and cooling load on the rock) by an order of magnitude for the same electrical output.
Heat transfer switches from conduction-dominated to convection-dominated.
In a well-designed, high-permeability fracture network, the supercritical fluid is buoyant and mobile. You get natural or strongly enhanced convection cells that sweep heat from a much larger volume of rock than the old HDR experiments ever touched. Surface area is now measured in square kilometers instead of hundreds of square meters.
Heat recharge rate in volcanic settings is completely different.
At Newberry, the background heat flux near the magma body is 300–1,000 mW/m (vs. ~80 mW/m continental average). Over a 1 km reservoir volume that’s hundreds of megawatts of continuous heat inflow. If your fracture cloud is big enough and permeable enough, you can pull 50–200 MW thermal more or less indefinitely without dropping the average rock temperature very much. (Fervo’s Project Red in Nevada—conventional temp, but still EGS—has already demonstrated ~3.5 MW from one well pair with negligible cooling over 18 months, and they’re only at ~190 C.)

Real remaining risks that the skeptic would be right to highlight:

Can you actually create and maintain a large, high-permeability fracture network at 500+ C and 10–20 km depth (or even 4–6 km near volcanoes) without it short-circuiting or sealing up with mineral precipitation? We don’t have field proof yet at those conditions.
Materials: drill bits, casings, pumps, and well cements that survive 500–600 C for 20–30 years do not fully exist off the shelf today. They’re being developed (high-nickel alloys, graphene-infused cements, etc.), but it’s expensive and unproven at scale.
Induced seismicity near an active volcano is non-trivial. Newberry is a shield volcano with low seismicity risk compared to, say, a subduction-zone stratovolcano, but still.
Economics: even if the resource works, LCOE has to beat new combined-cycle gas (~$40/MWh) and new nuclear (~$70–90/MWh) in the 2030s. The IEA’s “8 % of global electricity by 2050” scenario assumes superhot gets down to ~$30–50/MWh. That’s plausible only if wells become cheaper (thanks oil&gas tech transfer) and capacity factors stay >90 %.

Bottom line
The old “rock has terrible thermal conductivity, therefore geothermal is dead” argument is no longer a universal show-stopper for superhot volcanic/near-magmatic systems with modern EGS techniques. The physics really does flip in your favor above ~400–450 C. But turning that into thousands of gigawatts is still an engineering and materials challenge, not a solved problem. Mazama, Fervo, Eavor, Quaise, Sage Geosystems, etc., all have to demonstrate multi-decade performance at scale. The next 5–10 years of pilots will tell us whether the skeptics were merely early, or fundamentally right.
So: the ChatGPT answer you got was essentially correct on the physics and the generational shift. The Slashdot commenter is stuck in 1995 thinking, which is understandable—most of the industry was too until about 2018.
-----

If you think that this is incorrect information, a hallucination, or unduly sycophantic, I would like to hear your genuine case.

My new PC boosts instantly. What are they trying to improve? With oodles of RAM and absurdly fast SSDs there is nothing slow about a computer these days.

I upgraded from a Pixel 5 to 6 a couple years ago due to the unfixable OTA hardware security bug in the 1-5 models.

Some days I'd like more storage but really I can't see what else a newer device would get me. LineageOS 23 is asking me to upgrade to it; I guess I should after the December patches land.

Fortunately, we have you -- a knowledgeable human, who can propose the right points!

So, I asked Chat about what you said, and asked Chat-GPT to formulate a response that directly addresses your key points.
Let me know if it reads like randomly extruded text, or if it has relevance to your understanding and argument:

---
The Campi Flegrei project you’re describing was a natural hydrothermal system, not an engineered superhot-rock (SHR) system, and that distinction matters for both the chemistry and the physics.

A hydrothermal reservoir taps naturally circulating volcanic brine. Its fluid chemistry is whatever the rock has been stewing in for centuries: arsenic, boron, mercury, dissolved metals, HS, etc. The industry learned long ago that natural brines often destroy turbines, foul condensers, and require scrubbing that wipes out the thermodynamic efficiency. Those problems are real, and your experience confirms them.

Superhot-rock geothermal is a different class of project. It does not rely on natural brines, natural permeability, or natural aquifers. SHR / modern EGS systems:

Bring their own working fluid (usually treated water in a closed or semi-closed loop),

Create engineered fracture networks rather than using natural ones,

Operate in a supercritical regime (>374C, high pressure) where heat transport is dominated by convective sweep rather than slow conduction, and

Are sited where mantle heat flux is extremely high (e.g., Newberry), not just where water has accumulated in shallow formations.

The key point is that the problems you encountered at Campi Flegrei — toxic brine chemistry, turbine contamination, and power losses from scrubbing — are specific to hydrothermal geology, not to engineered SHR systems. SHR avoids most of that simply because it doesn’t use the volcanic soup; it uses injected water circulating through a designed heat-exchange zone.

Your numbers actually underline the potential: you were getting ~50 MW per well from a shallow (~350–400C) hydrothermal system with awful chemistry. Modern SHR aims for rock in the 400–500C+ range, with supercritical water carrying far more enthalpy per kilogram and without the brine-chemistry penalty.

Whether SHR proves economical at scale is still an open engineering question. But the Campi Flegrei outcome doesn’t generalize to SHR any more than the problems of early natural-steam geothermal plants generalized to modern binary-cycle systems.

Does this distinction make sense from your point of view?

JPEGXL really does everything webp does and so much more, and it's well thought out.

WebP isn't terrible; they are smaller than I would have guessed given that they have the container overhead, but there's no stunning argument for it. "Better than PNG for what we used PNG for." OK, true, but.

Google should just let AV1 be AV1 and focus on pushing HEVC out of the market with it. The real opponents of progress have left the image space and are mucking around with video and VR now. Google has the capability to do something about this and foster innovation.

Yes. It really is a moral duty to tell the Wright brothers that their pie in the sky visions have a track history of failure -- to remind them that there are good reasons flight isn't already a commonplace thing.

I talked with Chat-GPT to understand its argument, and the gist was: the critique about low thermal conductivity was absolutely correct for the geothermal attempts between ~1970 and 2010. But modern “superhot rock” geothermal is operating in a very different regime.

First, they can now induce vastly more fractures in the rock. Heat transfer in geothermal isn’t about the raw conductivity of solid rock - it’s about surface area. More fractures = more exposed hot rock = more efficient heat sweep. The fracture networks used today are orders of magnitude larger than the old HDR trials.

Second, the water isn’t just hot water or steam anymore. At these temperatures and pressures it becomes a supercritical fluid. That matters because it convects heat through the fracture network instead of relying on slow conduction. So you don’t get the old “hot spot next to the well / cold depleted zone” behavior - the fluid actively evens out temperature gradients.

Third, the sites they’re using now (like Newberry Volcano) have massively higher heat flux from below. Many of the early HDR projects were drilled into generic crustal hot rock with weak replenishment. Near a volcano, the heat flow is orders of magnitude higher.

Add to that the modern toolkit - horizontal drilling (mid-2000s onward), high-temperature drilling materials, computer-modeled fracture design, etc. None of this existed during the early HDR experiments that gave geothermal a bad reputation.

Chat-GPT summed it with a metaphor: the old Hot Dry Rock systems were like trying to heat your house using a candle in the corner. Tiny fracture zones, minimal surface area, conduction-limited, fast local cooling and slow reheating.

The new approach is more like engineering a large underground heat exchanger connected to a huge volcanic heat source.

And yes, you can overdraw heat - just like you can over-pump groundwater. But operators don’t have to push it that hard, and modern models tell them exactly how much heat they can sustainably take each year.

I don't understand these topics deeply? I'm hoping that you do, and that this will mean something to you.

I'm not an engineer, but here's what Chat-GPT thinks, when I shared your comment with it:

---

Not quite. This criticism is valid for old-school “hot dry rock” geothermal (1970-2010), but it doesn’t apply to the new superhot-rock designs.

It’s true that rock has low thermal conductivity and that conduction-limited systems cool locally if you withdraw heat faster than it flows back. That’s exactly why the early HDR [Lion: -- this means "Hot Dry Rock"] experiments never scaled.

But superhot-rock geothermal isn’t using the old model.

Three things have changed:

Supercritical water (>374C, high pressure).
At these temperatures you’re no longer circulating liquid water or steam. Supercritical fluid behaves like a gas in viscosity but carries heat like a liquid, and has dramatically higher enthalpy. It transfers heat through fractured rock convectively, not purely by conduction. That’s a completely different thermodynamic regime than the classic HDR studies.

Engineered fracture networks (modern EGS).
Today’s EGS looks much more like a controlled, high-permeability heat exchanger than a single injection well in a monolithic rock mass. You’re creating a huge surface area and letting supercritical fluid sweep heat through it. The limiting factor becomes the fracture network, not the bulk conductivity of a single block of granite.

Volcanic settings with very high heat flux.
The Newberry system is only a few miles from an active magma body. The heat inflow from depth is orders of magnitude higher than at the old HDR field sites. You still have to manage production rates, but you’re no longer relying on conduction through kilometers of cold crust.

The “if it were workable we’d already be using it” argument also doesn’t hold. We didn’t have:

* horizontal drilling at scale until the mid-2000s,

* the ability to design fracture networks with modern HPC,

* high-temperature drilling materials,

* or any commercial attempts at supercritical geothermal

until the last decade.

The physics hasn’t changed, but the engineering finally can reach the temperatures where supercritical convection dominates and where the geothermal resource is effectively thousands of times denser.

Superhot geothermal still has plenty of open questions (scaling, economics, long-term well integrity), but the “thermal conductivity of rock makes it impossible” critique is describing the previous generation of geothermal, not the current one.

In the markets, if enough people believe in the correlation then it magically becomes a causation.

> The failure of successive COPs to agree to get rid of fossil fuels means that this is going to become necessary

Nobody believes this anymore.

Global temperatures are cyclical and the current trend is very close to the normal periodic cycle. All the "models" have failed. Sure, 95% of "Climate Scientists" believe their funding should continue but the jig is up.

If they actually attempt to blot out the sun there is no limit to what normal thinking people will do to stop them.

Fortunately they are very unlikely to get any real support for this harebrained scheme.